“Power of Mysticism” and “Mysticism of Power”: Understanding the Sociopolitical History of a Neo-hindu Movement

Abstract

Religious institutions created by the extraordinary efforts of a single founder—like the one examined in this essay—try hard to assure the preservation of charisma, and to guarantee its Weberian “routinization”. But this attempt does not always succeed, and quite often what originally looks like the “power of mysticism”, allowing resolute individual and social transformations, in the gradual collective evolution of a religious field turns to crystallization, stratification, bureaucratization, quickly becoming a “mysticism of power” and losing its former elasticity, dynamism and persuasive capacity.

COVID-19 and religious congregations: Implications for spread of novel pathogens

“…The International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) is a transnational religious movement based on the Hindu philosophy of Bhakti. It became popular in the West in the 1960s, and its temples are found in several countries (Squarcini, 2002). About a thousand ISKCON devotees attended a funeral at its temple in Soho, London, on March 21, 2020.…”

Life of yoga and Neo-Hinduism: identities and belongings

“…The neo-Hindu movements established outside India stem from this Hindu renaissance, which began at the end of the 19th century. Authors such as Altglas (2004Altglas ( , 2005, Hatcher (2004), Squarcini (2002), andViotti (2015) use the concept of neo-Hinduism both to designate the historical diffusion of religion and the contemporary configuration of reinterpretations or adaptations of Hindu traditions in the global scale. In general terms, this new Hinduism constituted over the last century would be the neo-Vedanta inf luenced by the "West" (Hatcher, 2004).…”

Praying interaction rituals: Prayer, ritual, and spiritual capital in a contemporary neo-Guru movement

“…In this article, I focus on the practice of bhaktiyoga, or yoga of devotion, within the largely influential, although substantially understudied Mooji neo-Guru movement (for exceptions see Di Placido, 2018Placido, , 2022. In so doing, I contend that by bridging sociological theorizing with the growing literature on neo-Guru and neo-Hindu movements (Altglas, 2005(Altglas, , 2007(Altglas, , 2008(Altglas, , 2014Goldman, 2005;Lucia, 2014;Srinivas, 2008Srinivas, , 2010Squarcini, 2000Squarcini, , 2002Squarcini and Fizzotti, 2004;Urban, 2005Urban, , 2012Williamson, 2010), for example, an ad hoc framework to understand the social deployments, disciplining dynamics, and collective role of prayer in the social and discursive construction of the identity of the communities in question, can be formed.…”